Mugger & choker

Ex-con rapist accused in attacks on 2 women

A sex offender who spent eight years in prison for rape has been arrested for choking two elderly women during a pair of harrowing Queens muggings, officials said Tuesday.

Richard Smalls is facing two counts of robbery, strangulation and burglary for allegedly targeting the two victims inside their apartment buildings.

Smalls, 58, is charged with throttling a 72-year-old woman getting her mail in the lobby of her building near 64th Ave. and 98th St. in Rego Park on July 28.

Smalls (inset) demanded the woman’s valuables and ran off after taking cash and about $500 worth of jewelry from her, according to to cops.

She was taken to Long Island Jewish Forest Hills hospital with bruises.

On Aug. 9, he struck again, according to police, choking 79-year-old Rego Park senior Maria Salazar in the lobby of her building as she returned from picking up some milk from a store.

“She looked at him — she knew he was suspicious,” Salazar’s shaken daughter Valentina

Henao, 47, told the Daily News shortly after the attack. “So when the elevator came she opened the door and she went inside the elevator. The elevator closed so she thought she would just come upstairs — but he opened the elevator, went inside and grabbed her from the neck and pushed her.”

Smalls said nothing as he choked Salazar for about eight seconds, bruising her neck, then ran off with packages left on the lobby floor. He left behind some packages after opening them, providing potential fingerprint clues, Henao said.

“My biggest fear is that he’ll come back and do something,” Henao said. “I told [my mother] not to go out after 5 o’clock.”

Smalls lives in a homeless shelter in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, according to cops.

He is a registered sex offender who did eight years in prison after being convicted of rape and sodomy in 1981, officials said.

He was paroled in 1989 but found himself behind bars again in 2003 after he was arrested for breaking into a Rego Park woman’s home and forcing her to perform a sex act. He was convicted of sodomy and burglary and was released in March 2014, court records indicate. His parole ended last year, officials said.

Smalls was arrested Sunday for the two muggings and was ordered held without bail during a brief arraignment in Queens Criminal Court. He’s due back in court Friday.